Delivery Diaries: ‘Charcha over Chai’, India’s favourite beverage

Tea or coffee?

My daughter is an international golfer, and I am her official caddie. So, I get to accompany her on several international tournaments. Recently, when I was in the United Kingdom, where she was playing a tournament in Scotland, I came across a quaint café, where a menu item made me snicker- Chai Tea. For an Indian, it was as outrageous a tautology as “ATM machine”, “free gift” or “return back”!

The reference in the menu of course was to what has become known as Indian masala tea, which made me think that much like cricket and the English language, tea is something that we Indians inherited from the British Raj and made it our own.

Today, tea may appear an inseparable part of Indian life, but its prevalence as the hot beverage of choice is comparatively a recent phenomenon. Even tea’s extensive cultivation in India (we are world’s second largest tea producer) began as late as the 19th century. Rising demand for Chinese tea and porcelain created immense trade balance pressure on the British government, and to counter they did two things-smuggling opium in China, and started growing tea in Assam.

Elite to mass beverage

Even till before independence tea drinking habit was largely restricted to elites. Post-independence it was aggressive marketing campaigns by the Tea Board, and a reduction in price through mass production that made tea accessible. While some purists may snob at the method of bulk tea production in India where tea leaves are crushed and curled by rollers, resulting in a powdered version, the truth is that this is the most popular version of chai in India, and responsible for the way we make and consume it.

In fact, it is a misnomer to say we make it--- we “cook it” with an ample amount of sugar, milk and other condiments of our choice. The process gives the beverage the distinct red brown colour.

Coffee slips into the gap

At the turn of the 21st century, the mass prevalence of tea gave opportunities for coffee to create a premium image for itself. The coffee chains that proliferated in India around that time, were essentially offering private space to youngsters who would find it difficult to meet in public places without being accosted. With their modern ambience and projecting coffee as a trendy, modern beverage- places like Coffee Café Day, Barista and many others that followed created a trendy upmarket image for coffee. You would always “meet for a coffee”, and rarely “ask anyone out for a chai!”

It is here that I must give immense credit to enterprising founders of Chaayos and Chai Point, who have given India’s favourite beverage its mojo back. Through an amazing product selection, service curation and branding smarts, they have infused the much-needed pizzaz in the tea drinking habit.

Chai is still No. 1

The popularity of these two chains (and some others that have followed them), exhibits in delivery patterns as well. On Swiggy food delivery, chai orders are always more than coffee orders, by a sizable margin. At any given point of day, chai orders are more than coffee orders by at least 15-20 per cent, with the difference going up to 40-50 per cent during evenings.

One comes across interesting and endearing anecdotes, such as senior citizens who order from Chaayos, at their preferred evening teatime. Tea is also showing amazing acceptability in regions traditionally known to be that of coffee drinkers. Bengaluru for example has most percent of orders of chai. Across India, on our platform we see on an average more than one million orders which have tea components.

A purist of microeconomics may sneer at description of hot snacks and tea as complementary goods- as the data may not always show a negative cross elasticity of demand, but modern era behavioural economists do admit that psychology may play a part in certain settings in driving complementarity- and in our data there is direct correlation between consumption of tea and certain snacks such as bun maska, vada pav, poha and samosas. Interestingly there are several orders of coffee, where tea is a smaller component- indicating a family or friendly gathering, which always has that avid chai devotee. In fact, when we analyse orders in which coffee is the dominant component, tea features amongst the top five items that are ordered along.

Branding and the search for an edge

As a boy growing up in Kolkata, I remember my consternation when I saw tea sachets that carried the depiction Dilmah Darjeeling Tea. Dilmah is a well-known Sri Lankan brand (an exceptional product, I must say!), but I couldn’t understand how a tea that grew in Darjeeling could travel to Sri Lanka to be sold in sachets.

It was later that I realised that since the top-quality tea harvest (usually known as first flush) would be exported, the tea sachets available in India would usually carry the inferior varieties. It was amazing business nous of Dilmah’s management who realised that there was a potential of selling top quality tea in sachets to discerning customers and five star hotel rooms, that they would get Darjeeling and Assam team from India and pack it sachets.

I see a similar ingenuity in the younger entrepreneurs of these tea chains, where their menus provide a whole range of varieties popular in different parts. The Irani chai (made with thick version popular in Hyderabad), the cutting chai (the abstemious version of Mumbai), the Kadha (herbal concoctions our grandmothers would lovingly make), Noon Chai (the salty Kashmir version), Kesar Chai (with saffron), Adrak Chai (with ginger) and amazing permutations of desi and masala chais- which can be altered based one’s preference of milk, tea leaves and sugar quantities, reflect an appreciation of each consumer’s salient association with tea.

We are also witnessing the newer versions of chai. Bubble/Boba tea for instance is quite a rage in the younger group—it has witnessed a 70 per cent growth in orders in the last one year. Also gaining traction are Matcha, Thai, Iced varieties of tea.

An enigma, but that’s ok

“I haven’t the slightest idea,” responds Alice, when Mad Hatter in the iconic tea party scene of Alice in Wonderland, questions her, “Why is a raven like a writing desk?” Scholars have since then argued that Lewis Carrol intended the riddle to be without an answer. That is also true of India’s tryst with tea- how did a beverage which was alien to our country and possibly unsuited to its warm tropical climate, became so popular that some years ago, the government planned to bestow upon it the status of national beverage of India?

There is no definite answer to that- and that is not necessarily a bad thing.